Baker inspired dignity and intellect

Published 7:14 pm, Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Kathryn “Kitty” Cardwell Baker and husband moved to San Antonio after a censorship flap at Baylor.

Kathryn “Kitty” Cardwell Baker and husband moved to San Antonio after a censorship flap at Baylor.

Baker inspired dignity and intellect

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SAN ANTONIO — Kathryn “Kitty” Cardwell Baker thought nothing of going to college and earning a bachelor's degree. That she did so in the 1930s made her unusual, and her area of study, mathematics, even more so.

“I never thought my mother thought of herself as having limited choices,” her daughter Sallie Baker said. She believed that “if you grow up with a lot of dignity, and go on and do really well in school, you have no limitations at all.”

Kitty Baker died June 2 at 101.

Raised on her grandfather's farm, Baker had an aptitude for both math and art. After winning an art contest during high school, she attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College, which had a “strong reputation of arts and sciences,” Sallie Baker said.

“She started getting very fascinated with math, graduated with honors in mathematics and in German,” her daughter said. “She thought, 'Mathematics may be more practical for a woman who is going to be teaching.'”

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Baker was offered scholarships for graduate school at Columbia and Syracuse universities and at the University of Chicago. She chose Chicago, thinking that “if she went to ... Chicago, she could also do some work in art, because the Art Institute was there,” Sallie Baker said.

Baker was teaching at Baylor when she met her future husband, Paul Baker, also a teacher.

“I think the two of them had a conversation about art and sciences and creativity that started that day and never stopped,” Sallie Baker said, referring to the first time the couple went out.

They married in 1936, both teaching at Baylor until the early 1960s, when her husband, by then the chairman of the theatre arts department, put on a production of Eugene O'Neill's “A Long Day's Journey Into Night.”

The play proved too racy for the university, and when given a choice of either censoring the production or shutting it down, Paul Baker and 13 staff members from the department quit, moving to San Antonio where Trinity University welcomed them with open arms.

While in San Antonio, Kathryn Baker taught at San Antonio College and Trinity University. She also became involved in the art of stitchery and weaving, eventually owning four “gigantic looms” at the ranch house the couple built near Waelder.

Services: Memorial at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Presbyterian Church of Gonzales, 414 St. Louis St.

After the couple moved to Dallas, they retired in the early 1980s, settling at their ranch house full time.

Though Baker was never a stay-at-home mom, she never neglected her children.

“I remember a mother who was always there for us,” her daughter Retta Van Auken said. “It was nice to grow up with a mother whose intellectual life was so lively. During meals they would talk about things going on in their lives.”